25 With any promises of human life),
Long months of ease and undisturbed delight
Are mine in prospect;0 whither shall I turn, anticipation
By road or pathway, or through trackless field,
Up hill or down, or shall some floating thing
30 Upon the River point me out my course?
Dear Liberty! Yet what would it avail,
But for a gift that consecrates the joy?
For I, methought, while the sweet breath of heaven
Was blowing on my body, felt, within,
35 A correspondent breeze, that gently moved
With quickening virtue,2 but is now become
A tempest, a redundant0 energy, abundant
Vexing its own creation. Thanks to both,
And their congenial0 powers that, while they join kindred
40 In breaking up a long continued frost, Bring with them vernal0 promises, the hope springtime
Of active days urged on by flying hours;
Days of sweet leisure taxed with patient thought
Abstruse, nor wanting punctual service high,
45 Matins and vespers, of harmonious verse!3 Thus far, O Friend!4 did I, not used to make A present joy the matter of a Song,5
Pour forth, that day, my soul in measured strains,
That would not be forgotten, and are here
50 Recorded:?to the open fields I told
A prophecy:?poetic numbers0 came verse
Spontaneously, to clothe in priestly robe
A renovated0 Spirit singled out, renewed
Such hope was mine, for holy services:
55 My own voice cheered me, and, far more, the mind's
Internal echo of the imperfect sound;
To both I listened, drawing from them both
A chearful confidence in things to come.
Content, and not unwilling now to give
60 A respite to this passion,6 I paced on With brisk and eager steps; and came at length
To a green shady place where down I sate
Beneath a tree, slackening my thoughts by choice,
And settling into gentler happiness.
65 'Twas Autumn, and a clear and placid day,
2. Revivifying power. ('To quicken' is to give or breeze and breath, at once materia] and spiritual, restore life.) is represented in other Romantic poems, such as
3. I.e., verses equivalent to morning prayers (mat-Coleridge's 'The Eolian Harp' and Percy Shelley's ins) and evening prayers (vespers). The opening 'Ode to the West Wind' as well as in the opening
passage (lines 1?45), which Wordsworth calls in letter of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
book 7, line 4, a 'glad preamble,' replaces the tra-4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to whom Wordsworth
ditional epic device, such as Milton had adopted addresses the whole of the Prelude. For Coleridge's
in Paradise Lost, of an opening prayer to the Muse response, after the poem was read to him, see 'To
for inspiration. To be 'inspired,' in the literal William Wordsworth' (p. 471).
sense, is to be breathed or blown into by a divinity 5. In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth
(in Latin spirare means both 'to breathe' and 'to says that his poetry usually originates in 'emotion
blow'). Wordsworth begins his poem with a 'bless-recollected in tranquillity'; hence not, as in the
ing' from an outer 'breeze,' which (lines 34?45) preceding preamble, during the experience that it
